The Race That Never Was
I dropped Robin off at her parents' house and stayed the night, then left to go back to Chicago. I wanted to make a few diversions along the way, though. Nothing extensive; we'd spent too much money driving my daughter to Colorado for me to go to West Virginia or Delaware or anything. It'd be just a round-about path up through Ohio. But first, I drove down to Gallatin County, KY, to check on Robin's parents' old river house and see if it had fallen in the river or been blown up by road construction guys who hadn't been informed it was there. (There's an ongoing saga about that.)
Interstate 71 runs past the Kentucky Speedway, a 1.5-mile cookie-cutter oval race track that's been around since the year 2000 and started hosting an annual NASCAR Cup stock car race in 2011. If you've been following this page for a while, you might recall that we went to this race in 2014. We borrowed Robin's parents' Winnebago and Winnebago-camped in the campground just the other side of this sign (which wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped).
The Speedway meant to hold its NASCAR race last year, too, but then ... well, It didn't. For obvious reasons. The Plague tossed the NASCAR schedule (and the schedule for all sports) into disarray, and July 9-11 was way too early in the process for the race officials and the speedway owners and the Kentucky Department of Public Health to work anything out. NASCAR did eventually run a partial schedule at a lot of their tracks, and toward the end of the season, they even let limited numbers of socially-distanced fans in to watch some of the races. But they never came back to Kentucky. This sign advertises a doomed race that never ran.
It's worse than all that, though, at least if you're a fan of the Kentucky NASCAR race. (And who isn't?) NASCAR has long been thinking of rejiggering its schedule anyway, and the hammer was likely to fall on at least a few race tracks when various contracts came up in 2022. But they took the Plague as an opportunity to jump that up a year and cut various tracks out of the loop early. Chicagoland down in Joliet was one of them. Kentucky Speedway was another. The Speedway had fought a decade to get this race, and they ran it 8 years, then lost it. Which makes a lot of people in Gallatin County very sad, as they thought the race would make them rich. (It didn't.)
Now, I have a few suspicions about this, and one is that NASCAR pulled out of places with governors who had instituted strong restrictions against the Plague. NASCAR was likely unsure whether Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois or Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky would allow them to have fans at their tracks, so they just took the races in these states away. But it's also true that neither race was really a Big Thing on the NASCAR schedule, and people had been talking about the Kentucky race going away for a while. Either way, I don't know that I think the race is all that big of a loss, though I wonder how long this sign will stand here in passive-aggressive response.
The Race That Never Was
I dropped Robin off at her parents' house and stayed the night, then left to go back to Chicago. I wanted to make a few diversions along the way, though. Nothing extensive; we'd spent too much money driving my daughter to Colorado for me to go to West Virginia or Delaware or anything. It'd be just a round-about path up through Ohio. But first, I drove down to Gallatin County, KY, to check on Robin's parents' old river house and see if it had fallen in the river or been blown up by road construction guys who hadn't been informed it was there. (There's an ongoing saga about that.)
Interstate 71 runs past the Kentucky Speedway, a 1.5-mile cookie-cutter oval race track that's been around since the year 2000 and started hosting an annual NASCAR Cup stock car race in 2011. If you've been following this page for a while, you might recall that we went to this race in 2014. We borrowed Robin's parents' Winnebago and Winnebago-camped in the campground just the other side of this sign (which wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped).
The Speedway meant to hold its NASCAR race last year, too, but then ... well, It didn't. For obvious reasons. The Plague tossed the NASCAR schedule (and the schedule for all sports) into disarray, and July 9-11 was way too early in the process for the race officials and the speedway owners and the Kentucky Department of Public Health to work anything out. NASCAR did eventually run a partial schedule at a lot of their tracks, and toward the end of the season, they even let limited numbers of socially-distanced fans in to watch some of the races. But they never came back to Kentucky. This sign advertises a doomed race that never ran.
It's worse than all that, though, at least if you're a fan of the Kentucky NASCAR race. (And who isn't?) NASCAR has long been thinking of rejiggering its schedule anyway, and the hammer was likely to fall on at least a few race tracks when various contracts came up in 2022. But they took the Plague as an opportunity to jump that up a year and cut various tracks out of the loop early. Chicagoland down in Joliet was one of them. Kentucky Speedway was another. The Speedway had fought a decade to get this race, and they ran it 8 years, then lost it. Which makes a lot of people in Gallatin County very sad, as they thought the race would make them rich. (It didn't.)
Now, I have a few suspicions about this, and one is that NASCAR pulled out of places with governors who had instituted strong restrictions against the Plague. NASCAR was likely unsure whether Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois or Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky would allow them to have fans at their tracks, so they just took the races in these states away. But it's also true that neither race was really a Big Thing on the NASCAR schedule, and people had been talking about the Kentucky race going away for a while. Either way, I don't know that I think the race is all that big of a loss, though I wonder how long this sign will stand here in passive-aggressive response.